Hi Everyone,
Just a quick update to let you know I’m alive and well. Sorry for the long delay since last posting. I’ve quite literally been flat out every single day. Last week Tuesday thru Friday I was up and in the field at or before 6:00 am. I’m a herpetologist! We’re supposed to get up with the lizards at 10:30! There’s a reason I didn’t want to study birds.
Still, the early mornings have generated lots of adventures, which I fully intend to fill you in on asap. Until then though, here’s the product of my first early morning: the second set of sticky traps and pitfall traps I collected at the crack of dawn on Tuesday. All in all I had 144 sticky traps and 216 pitfall traps, which should hopefully give me a good snapshot of the insect communities around the rock walls.
After the craziness in Africa trying to smear tanglefoot on 3×5 index cards (read about it here) I decided to splurge and buy the real thing (for an additional $7) DEFINITELY a good investment. I also had the idea to preserve them in the plastic sheathes that fit into a 3 ring binder. Much better than my previous debacle with seran wrap in the field. So here they are… now all I have to do is sort through all of them, identify their order and count ’em up! Oh, and then sort through the soggy insects in the pitfall traps… I really need to do that soon…
Colin Donihue 